On October 5, Creative Commons and P2PU convened community advocates and policy leaders from the various “open” movements to lay the curriculum framework for the School of Open. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a community initiative that will provide online educational resources and professional development courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Participants gathered the day before for a convening on an Open Policy Institute, which will be blogged about separately in the coming weeks.

The meeting/workshop was extremely valuable in identifying existing needs around education and training on open policy, open education, open access, open science, and open culture. It was also a lot of fun! The full agenda and raw notes are at the etherpad, but here is a brief overview.

First, in pictures:

We broke out into groups and thought long and hard about the one person we’d really like to help as part of the School of Open. Who would actually come to take courses about “open” and what would they want to learn about? What questions would they have? The result was a set of detailed user scenarios spanning from Marcie the researcher working for a legislator to Maggie the wannabe rap star, from academic Professor Lovenchalk with questions about losing control over his work to elementary school teachers with questions about CC and copyright, and even to “optics nerds” on Wikipedia. You can check out all the user scenarios at Flickr. The folder of user scenarios will continue to grow with each workshop.

Based on our user scenarios, we outlined course ideas, potential partners, and existing resources. Course ideas included: Crash course on the basics of open for government officials; How to ensure that my film can be shared; Rights info and tagging for (cultural) curators; How to integrate Wikipedia authorship in your academic workflow; Intro to Open Textbooks; and OER for faculty: what’s in it for me? More courses outlined at the pad.

Everyone was excited for the potential of the School of Open to support existing efforts and demand. And we want you to join us! Whether you’re part of the CC, P2PU, Open Access, OER, free culture, or any other open communities, the School of Open exists to support your education needs. We are aiming for an ambitious (but not impossible!) official launch date of February 2013, with at least five facilitator-led courses and five peer-led courses. Help make this possible by joining in course development efforts!

Where do I start?

1. Go to http://schoolofopen.org and get familiar with the project. What course do you want to take or build?
2. Join the discussion and introduce yourself and your field of “open” interest: https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open. See if others are interested in building it with you. Someone might already be developing the course you want to create.
3. Register for a P2PU account at http://p2pu.org.
4. Start creating! You can create directly on the P2PU platform or use http://pad.p2pu.org for collaborative editing. Just make sure to email the list or the Project Manager (that’s me) with a link to the working draft so we can help.

We will be holding several virtual meetings (eg. webinars) to support course creators, so stay tuned for those!

For those of you who just want to receive key updates and find out when the School of Open officially launches, sign up for our announcements-only list.

The School of Open is being run as an open community project — which means that you can help shape its direction and drive it forward. Find out more about that here.

Also see: School of Open builds community at the Open Knowledge Festival

The government of British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, has announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first- and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. The texts will be available for free online, or at a low cost for printed versions, to approximately 200,000 students. The first texts under this project could be in use at B.C. institutions as early as 2013 for courses in arts, sciences, humanities, and business.

BCcampus, a publicly funded collaborative information technology organization serving the higher-education system, will engage B.C. faculty, institutions, and publishers to implement the open textbook project through an open request for proposals.

David Porter, executive director for BCcampus, explained why CC licenses are crucial to this project. “Open licenses are integral to making textbooks free for students, and flexible enough for instructors to customize the material to suit their courses.”

B.C.’s minister of advanced education, John Yap, announced the project at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver. He said students could save up to $1,000 a year on textbooks if free, open versions were available for many of their courses, and he challenged other jurisdictions to follow British Columbia’s lead and support open educational resources: “By taking advantage of technology, more people can get the learning they need in the knowledge economy and access to new or better jobs.”

You might remember that a few weeks ago, we celebrated a similar piece of legislation in California. The British Columbia legislation was actually based on California’s version. Taken together, these are exciting steps for the OER (open educational resources) movement. Since the textbooks produced in B.C. and California will be licensed under the CC BY license, their impact has the potential to spread far beyond the US and Canada, being reused and adapted by educators around the world.

B.C. is leveraging 21st-century technologies and licensing to ensure that its citizens have affordable access to high-quality post-secondary textbooks. Open licensing on publicly funded content ensures the greatest impact for the public dollar.

Read the full press release.

There was an OER Forum later that week. Videos and images.

Ada Lovelace — widely considered the first computer programmer — famously said, “I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” That quotation brings to mind the axiom that a curious mind is always asking more questions and learning is never complete. Every day, like Lovelace, I am all too aware that my knowledge is dwarfed by what I have yet to learn.

Around the world today, the technology community is celebrating Lovelace and the many women in technology who’ve followed in her footsteps. Here at Creative Commons, we think a lot about women in science and technology and the untapped potential we have yet to realize. In his speech to the United Nations a few weeks ago, President Obama spoke of the importance of women and girls in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The White House identified Creative Commons as a key member of an emerging community of practice supporting girls in STEM.

A few days later, Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced that we’d formed a task force to determine how open educational resources (OER) can support the success of girls and women in STEM fields. As I said in that announcement, the challenges of the future will require bright, ambitious, well-educated people of both genders.

Many people reading this probably know that the OER movement played a pivotal role in my career. When I was at the Hewlett Foundation, we made a gamble in starting our OER initiative. At that time, OER was an untested idea. Today, those early investments are paying off, with open-licensed resources benefitting women, men, boys, and girls around the world, many of whom wouldn’t otherwise have access to high-quality educational materials that can be localized and improved for teaching and learning.

But like Lovelace, we’re not yet satisfied. Last month’s groundbreaking open textbook legislation in California was a huge step in the right direction, but it was just one step. We must keep the end vision in mind: together, we can democratize education through openly licenses resources, tools and processes. While we can’t create future Ada Lovelaces in a lab, we can provide for a culture of education that rises to the challenge of its most curious learners.

Geoscience Australia recently announced that it will license all images from the Landsat 8 satellite under CC BY. (Geoscience Australia is a partner of the United States Geological Survey in the Landsat program.)

Creative Commons Australia reports:

The new Landsat 8 satellite is scheduled to be launched in early 2013, with GA’s full implementation being scheduled for May or June 2013.

Upon full implementation, which involves the deployment of major infrastructure upgrades by GA, data will be beamed from Landsat 8 on a daily basis to GA-operated ground stations in Alice Springs and Darwin. As soon as possible after receipt and processing, GA will make the satellite images publicly available free of charge.

GA will make the data available under a Creative Commons CC BY Australia 3.0 licence, which will facilitate legal reuse of the images.

GA is expecting a major upsurge in demand for the images when its free to air service is up and running. Jeff Kingwell, Section Leader of GA’s National Earth Observation Group, has indicated this prediction is based on the experience of its senior partner Geological Survey where there was a 1000 fold usage increase on commencement of its free to air service online. “Our experience is that using the Creative Commons Attribution Licence — which is the default licence for GA information — makes the data more useful and easier to apply. For example, to help the Indonesian government to monitor forest management, GA supplies Landsat data from a number of foreign data archives. Since we can apply the same licence conditions to each data source, the information is much more useful and easier to share and reuse.”

(Read the full article.)

Here at Creative Commons, we applaud governments and intergovernmental organizations licensing their information and data under CC licenses (or the CC0 public domain waiver). Australia’s partnership with the United States in the Landsat program is a perfect example of why it’s important to use a license that’s open and internationally applicable.

A few weeks ago a group of CC staffers traveled to the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, Finland to meet with our friends in the open knowledge and data community. There were many welcome outcomes from this – including our European regional meeting (expect a post on this soon) – not the least of which was our second School of Open workshop.

For those who haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a collaboration between Creative Commons and P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). Its aim is to provide easily digestible educational exercises, resources, and professional development courses that help individuals and institutions learn about and employ open tools, such as the CC licenses. You can find out more at this wiki page.

During the second half of 2012, Creative Commons is holding School of Open workshops around the world, including Berlin, Palo Alto, Mexico City, London, and Jakarta. The idea behind these workshops is to bring together those interested in spreading the word about open knowledge, teach them about peer-learning and the role it can play in this, and (hopefully) start them down the track of creating their own peer-led course on open.

The Helsinki workshop, which ran on the Wednesday of the festival, was a joint project with the School of Data, a similar initiative run by P2PU and the Open Knowledge Foundation to promote data literacy and data ‘wrangling’ skills. The workshop was a great success, with a full house of more than 25 attendees, including educators, programmers, digital technologists and enthusiasts. After introductions and explanations, about 12 chose to work on projects for the School of Open, while the rest broke off to take School of Data courses.

In just four hours, this School of Open team managed to complete the “Teach someone something with open content” challenge and get a good way through the “Make a P2PU course in half an hour” mini-course. The result were outlines for several new P2PU courses, designed to teach people new skills entirely through CC-licensed and other open materials including “How to share and distribute a song”. You can find all related notes and materials from the workshop here.

Feedback from the participants in the workshop was great – everyone felt that by the end of the day they had a good understanding of the workings of the School of Open and the potential it had to provide learning resources for anyone and everyone. They also had some great feedback on ways to improve the school’s web interface, materials and structure, based on their own experiences and expertise. And they were all keen to continue to work on their courses and the School of Open.

Congratulations to all those who participated in the workshop on achieving so much in such a short amount of time. We look forward to seeing you around the School of Open discussion lists and events. For anyone else who wants to get involved, the best way to start is to join the discussion list and/or sign up for announcements. You can also email the Project Manager directly.